A wonderful LIFE

Many of the images from the pages of LIFE magazine are iconic: the sailor kissing the nurse in Times Square on V-J Day by Alfred Eisenstaedt, the aerial shot of a near drowning on Coney Island by Margaret Bourke-White, Gordon Parks' "American Gothic" portrait of cleaner Ella Watson, Larry Burrow's photo of a GI shot dead onboard the Yankee Papa 13 in Vietnam, Phillipe Halsman's swirling...

Books for the studious and the scholarly

Are you struggling to summon gift ideas for the intellectual in your life? If so, you can un-furrow your brow starting now. This holiday season, let BookPage help you shop for the studious and the scholarly those lovers of learning who emerge from their erudite pursuits hunch-backed and bleary-eyed but triumphant. In anticipation of your Christmas quandary, our industrious editors closeted...

Struggles down South: Life lessons from true survivor Shelley Stewart

Think your life has been hard? Imagine growing up black in the legally segregated South and, at the age of five, seeing your father kill your mother with an ax. Imagine a relative with whom you've sought refuge stripping you naked, hanging you from the ceiling and whipping you until the blood runs then rubbing salt into the cuts. Imagine having...

Fiction from a media mogul

Backstage and on the page with the King of television talk. For political junkies and devotees of behind-the-scenes drama, a new book by CNN's Larry King is a dream come true. Viewers of Larry King Live know that all kinds of drama and melodrama take place backstage and out of sight during commercial breaks. If only we could get a peek! With Anything Goes! What I've Learned from...

To the tune of Travolta

When it was first published, the anonymously-authored Primary Colors--an obvious roman a clef about the Clintons--triggered a national guessing-game about the author's true identity. Appropriately, the Washington Post wound up outing Newsweek columnist Joe Klein (following Klein's blanket denials, to his comrades in print, that he was the author). The controversy didn't end there....

Among the unlikely results of a shipwreck 86 years ago is Leonardo DiCaprio's current starring role in the daydreams of teenage females from Boise to Baghdad. DiCaprio was lucky to be aboard James Cameron's film Titanic. By now, as everyone knows, the film can be described only in superlatives. It is the most expensive movie ever made, the highest-grossing motion picture of all time, the first...